Tokens of Affection
by munkinette
Summary: During the Ogre Wars, princess Belle nurses Rumplestiltskin back to health. After he becomes the Dark One, he comes for her.


_Metal crashing on metal, metal cutting through flesh. Ogre breaking bone, man putting man's bone back together._

Rumplestiltskin awoke with a start, blanket gripped firmly in his bony fingers and fingers clutched to his chest, body hunched so he would occupy the least bit of space in his hospital bed, trying hard not to be there at all. It was terrible that he couldn't see, that blasted explosion be damned. Not seeing made him uncertain whether it had all been a dream or reality, made him feel like he was still there, on the outskirts of the battlefield, shoved to the back of a dark tent next to another hundred men trying to get some sleep while shivering from the cold and the prospect of tomorrow.

The sharp pain in his ankle spoke of the present, though. His forcible companion, in equal parts distressing and reassuring. The pain was mind-numbing, but it also meant no future for him as a soldier, and Rumplestiltskin had been fortunate at that. A living, crippled coward with a future was better than a fallen soldier without one. Dying on the battlefield wasn't honorable, not when it accomplished nothing but serving your dead remains as food for the ogres. At least that was what the kind-hearted lady kept telling him. It was not that Rumplestiltskin didn't believe her; he just wished he didn't need to.

Belle. The lady's name was Belle. She had confided it to him one night, while she changed his bandages and raked her cool fingers through his sweat matter hair, checking for a fever, and Rumplestiltskin has cherished it ever since. He's not very certain, but he thinks that must have been nearly four full moons ago. Lady Belle's soft-spoken words and gentle touches are the only glances at beauty and kindness he's had in a very long time. Under such a merciful distraction, he's bound to lose the track of time.

She reminds him of how he'd dreamed the world to be, once upon a time, when he was still spinning peacefully at his wheel, sitting quietly like a good adopted son and pretending not to exist, long before the death of his aunts and his own poverty struck and the war came and took all his dreams from him. Lady Belle sounded like acceptance and felt like tenderness. She must have looked like beauty, too, if only he could see her. She returned the dreams to him, made him think of sharing more with her, mornings spent in the sun and late dinners by the fire. All things he would never be allowed to have. Sometimes he wants to beg her to take the illusion of such a blissful world away from him, before it hurts him too much to let it go.

Rumplestiltskin wills himself not to panic, to sit still in his bunk bed. The night will end, eventually. He will await the morning, and the morning will bring him her. And he will be safe again until nightfall. And in that time, Lady Belle would support his shoulder and share her stories, and she would teach him how to feel again. Feel something more than pain and despair.

* * *

It has been ten years since the young princess nursed him back to health, and pain and despair is all he feels. She must be thirty years old now, although Rumplestiltskin feels like a hundred years have passed. But no, only ten years this day since he'd regained his vision to a smile blossoming on her beautiful face, a smile that only grew wider when he managed to take his first step without her help. Ten long years since he'd gone outside the makeshift hospital for the first time in months, and carved himself a staff while sat on a solitary rock on the outskirts of the camp. Ten years since he'd gathered his belongings in the dead of night and vanished without a trace.

He did think about leaving her a note, but she never got around to teach him the letters like she had one time promised she would, back when he was still blind and she always kind. He could have left her a rose. There were some beautiful red ones growing just below the spot where he had last spoken to her, when she had appeared at his back just as he was finishing carving his staff. She had smoothed a stray curl from his shoulder and told him to look ahead, lest he would miss the sunset. It was a lovely sight, the only serene sunset of his life, but not lovelier than her when he turned to look and she was staring into the unknown, fierce and curious and hopeful. That was when he knew he had to leave. It was either leave her or love her, and he didn't know how to love someone as perfect and precious as Belle.

So he left her no rose in the end, for he didn't know how to say goodbye to someone he cared for. The people he loved usually said goodbye to him. She wouldn't miss him much, he consoled himself. He was poor at conversation, poorer to look at. Plain poor, he was. And she had her plans to leave her home, conquer the word, be a hero. She had that future awaiting for her, while all he had was a duffel bag of rags and a spinning wheel barely holding itself together waiting for him in a village no one had heard named before, for barely no one ever set foot in. Leaving was for the best.

He hadn't counted on becoming the Dark One at some point during these ten years, nor of thinking of her every single day. He watched her from time to time, his face pressed to the magic looking glass to catch all he could of her. When he first commanded the mirror to show him Belle, he knew he was crossing a line. But then she appeared, even more beautiful than he remembered, and he knew he would be crossing that line very often from then on. It seemed she had gone in search of her adventure. He saw her fighting a beast that turned out to be a prince in disguise, he saw her drinking ale in a dwarf tavern. He saw her looking flushed and happy, chatting to every man and woman she met. And then he saw her smile waver, and soon she returned to her home, settling into a routine of walking her father's gardens with her nose stuck in a book.

He couldn't help it at first. It was just that she had looked so upset, finishing the first tome of Her Handsome Hero and discovering the second wasn't in her father's library, that he couldn't help himself. He magicked the book on her bed while she was taking her walk, and watched her eyes widen to plates and a brilliant smile light her lovely face when she returned to see it. Then it was that single red rose, the one he'd been too much of a coward to gift her all those years ago, that he magicked to never wither and placed on her bedside table, to lure her into peaceful dreams. Some time after that it was the pen and paper from Agrabah, for although he could well write and read by now, he wished he would have learned it from her and not a curse.

And then it was himself. Cast in an invisibility cloak, barely daring to breathe. He would be there for just a moment, he promised himself. Just a moment to remember the exact hue of her blue eyes, her smell and her warmth. And it was indeed only a moment, before it turned to two, and then to three, until he ended up spending his nights in her chair, guarding her sleep. It only seemed fitting, since she had once been there to soothe his fears and drive away his nightmares, that he did the same for her.

And then there was that damned morning, when he couldn't bare not touching her any longer, and he dared brush the tiniest strand of hair out of her sleeping face. And he leaned on her bed heavily enough to wake her. She screamed, because he had somehow managed to bare his hand from his cloak, scaly, clawing and menacing. He should have magicked himself away that instant, never to bother or frighten her again, to spare her of looking upon the foolish monster who left her tokens of his affection in the hope that she could somehow, in some wondrous way, love him back. But look upon him she did, and when her breathing evened out, she grasped his hand, frozen in mid air, and slowly pushed his cloak off his shoulders, baring himself to her. And then the strangest, most inexplicable thing happened, because Belle smiled at him, brighter than he had ever seen her smile before, and said _"Rumplestiltskin, __I've been looking everywhere for you!__"_


End file.
